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Online Video Subtitles for SEO

2Mar

Capital Captions provides subtitle services for online videos on client websites and video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. There are many advantages to using our online video subtitles for SEO to boost your SEO, and here are just a few:

How Subtitle Services can Enhance Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

It’s fairly well known in the business world that keywords have a major impact online in getting your business to rank high within Google and other search engines. Blogs and pages on your website are important, but ideas can run out and blogging can be both time consuming and expensive.

Many businesses are also aware that Google also ranks pages higher if they contain a link to video content, but most overlook the benefit to adding professional subtitling services to their online media content. Key words within ‘interactive transcripts’ as they are called, are searchable and help to boost a company’s search engine ranking.

Automated Subtitles vs Professional Subtitle Services

It may be tempting to just use YouTube automatically generated subtitles for your transcripts, but there are a number of reasons against this:

Automatic caption features on websites such as YouTube use speech recognition software where errors are often made around spellings including homophones, important names and jargon. Misspelling of well known spellings within your industry can be detrimental not only to the reputation or your company but to your SEO potential. For instance, automatic captions would likely subtitle a ‘FTSE 100’ company as ‘footsie 100’, reflecting how the word sounds rather than understanding the context and using the abbreviation that finance professionals are familiar within.

Subtitle services that are written by professional transcriptionists and subtitlers are far superior when it comes to syntax, punctuation and grammar. Our subtitles are written to match onscreen dialogue, but where there is repetition, mumbling including (ums, ers, etc) and general mistakes in grammar which may have a negative impact on understanding, amendments are made. Subtitles that are created automatically through sites such as YouTube feature every word that is spoken as they sound, including repetition or mistakes in speech. Depending on the grammatical ability and language proficiency of speakers within a video, automatic captions can sometimes lead to almost entirely incoherent subtitles.

Readability is far superior when using professional subtitle services. Well written subtitles generally end lines with a full stop before starting the next subtitle, but automatic captions systems generate subtitles where full stops, commas and general pauses in speech fall completely at random. This means sentences can finish after the first word on a subtitle line and then continue within that very same line where there is a long pause in between. This often leads to the viewer reading text that hasn’t even closed to been started yet. This is highly distracting to an audience, not reader friendly and generally looks highly unprofessional.

One final point is not specifically around SEO but rather, reputation. It’s worth taking into consideration that poorly written, automated subtitles, whilst helping boost your search engine rankings to help bring in customers, are often of a quality that is below standard for foreign speakers or the hard of hearing to actually allow them access to your content. So those audiences who find your online videos through Google may be unable to effectively understand the key messages you are trying to put across through that content. Whilst YouTube and other sites’ automatic captions may seem like a cost saver, it can be counterproductive when spending a lot of money in creating a professional video to scrimp on the final hurdle and wind up leaving a very poor impression on audiences that actually need to use those subtitles. Using professional typing services to create video subtitles for SEO can mean spending a little more money to get your message out a long way.

If you’re interested in our online video subtitles for SEO, please don’t hesitate to get a quote or contact us via our online form. Alternatively, you can call us on +44 (0) 1634 867131.

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At Capital Captions, we take pride in our flexible, tailor-made approach to subtitling, closed captioning and video transcription services, We offer professional, reliable, cost effective services to clients across the globe.